Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/86

 But at the moment of leaving she would have gone any place to escape having to remain in that hateful Southern California college, or having to face the more dreaded alternative of returning home. Home? It had never been a home.

It did seem strange, this being in Harlem when only a few weeks before she had been over three thousand miles away. Time and distance—strange things, immutable, yet conquerable. But was time conquerable? Hadn’t she read or heard somewhere that all things were subject to time, even God? Yet, once she was there and now she was here. But even at that she hadn’t conquered time. What was that line in Cullen’s verse, “I run, but Time’s abreast with me?” She had only traversed space and defied distance. This suggested a more banal, if a less arduous thought tangent. She had defied more than distance, she had defied parental restraint—still there hadn’t been much of that—friendly concern—there had been still less of that, and malicious, meddlesome gossip, of which there had been plenty. And she still found herself unable to understand why two sets of people in two entirely different communities should seemingly become almost hysterically excited because she, a woman of twenty-one, with three years’ college training and ample sophistication in the ways of sex and self-support, had decided to take a job as an actress’